3 Ways Visual Content Can Enhance Your Ecommerce User Experience

Nowadays, while making a purchase decision, consumers are bombarded with lot of information and choices. Because of this, consumers seek information to be served up quickly and digested easily. The attention span has further reduced with the rapid migration from the desktop environment to the mobile platform. These rapid decrease of human attention span have enhanced the need for visual innovation on eCommerce sites. According to Hubspot, 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. As a result, including visuals have also proven to impact conversion for online retailers.

The 3 important ways by which eCommerce websites can leverage the use of visuals to boost sales are:

Trending Product Recommendations

Displaying the trending products on social media pages and on the website, increases the visibility of a product that is already popular among the consumers. For new visitors, it works well as it relies on the power of social proof. This can evoke a customer’s interest and make him/her browse more. Similarly, for returning customers showing recommendations helps to improve cross-sell and up-sell by suggesting additional products.

Best Bully Sticks, displays the product recommendations in its Facebook page as shown in the image below. Social traffic generated from these social recommendations is converting at a high rate of 34.62%, driving up the social ROI for Best Bully Sticks.

User Generated Photo-Testimonials

Social tools like sharing and referrals creates a peer to peer influence that have taken the word of mouth phenomenon online. In order to convert new shoppers, businesses must include peer ratings and reviews to certify that the products can be trusted. Using social media, photo testimonials have become a trend for the eCommerce players.

Customers can upload their selfies with the purchased product to display their approval and experience while using it. New customers tend to find these user-generated visual testimonials more trustworthy than the age old online reviews. For instance, online service for delivering flowers and gifts, EnviaFlores.com, collects visual testimonials from social media channels, by encouraging customers to post their selfies using specific hashtags. This is resulting in uplift in sales conversion rate, with EnviaFlores seeing sales conversion rate as high as 27.05%.

Implementing Visual Search

Visual Search technology has become one of the most interesting trends in eCommerce recently. An analysis from a range of eCommerce sites to understand what people value when shopping online showed, 30% of purchase decisions are influenced by visual search. Unlike a keyword search, visual search identifies the shape, color, size and even text to identify brand and product names from an image. This helps the search engine to return the exact product that a consumer is searching.

For example, Heels.com’s ‘Sole Mate’ feature allows customers to upload photos of their own or link to image URLs to scour the site’s vast catalog of footwear.

One of the popular trends for eCommerce industry in 2015 is the extensive use of visuals. As shown in the above examples, visual content will help you to increase user engagement of your site and increase conversions.